


Because You're There

by damalur



Category: The Big Bang Theory (TV)
Genre: F/M, Mountaineering, Work In Progress
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-22
Updated: 2013-10-05
Packaged: 2017-12-27 07:07:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/975905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damalur/pseuds/damalur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Crack, physics, love letters, and the rooftop of the world.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Occasionally it seems like a good idea to revive a story you haven't worked on for two years in a fandom you apparently never stopped loving concerning a topic with which you have no actual experience. You know. Hypothetically.
> 
> Thanks to the incomparable Odyle for serving as sounding board and corralling all the words (all of them!).

1.

The year after she turned twenty-seven, Penny said fuck it and booked herself a coach-class ticket to Nepal.

Then she climbed Mount Everest.

It wasn't as easy as it sounded.

 

2.

It wasn't easy for a whole slew of reasons. Heading up the obstacle course was the cost of joining a commercial expedition, followed by the inability of the human body to function at twenty-six thousand feet above sea level, which led directly to the problem of her birthplace and how she'd never actually set foot on any geographical feature that could be called a mountain, even optimistically.

She'd been born in Nebraska. Nebraska was pretty flat, as far as states went.

Sheldon took a little time to get on board with the plan. Penny decided to tackle the easiest problem first, and even if Sheldon didn't have the answer, he'd at least have _an_ answer. The conversation went like this:

"Sheldon," she said, "I need money. Lots of money."

Sheldon didn't look up from his computer. "How much money?"

Penny did a quick burst of mental arithmetic, arrived at a number, and grimaced. "About sixty-five thousand dollars. To start."

"And you need sixty-five thousand dollars for what purpose? It had better involve lasers. Does it involve lasers, Penny?"

"I'm going to climb Mount Everest," Penny announced.

Sheldon's fingers twitched on the keyboard. After he reoriented himself on the home row, he said, "That idea, like so many of your ill-conceived notions, is both preposterous and potentially fatal."

"Okay," she said.

"However, if I agree to help you, you will in turn agree to owe me one favor, the nature of which will be determined by me at a later date. Also, I want our verbal contract duplicated in writing."

"Done," Penny said, not unaware of the heavy doors of fate slamming shut behind her. Or that could be Bernadette across the hall—Bernadette was a slammer.

"Excellent," said Sheldon. "I believe it's time to move to New York."

"Yeah, that's really not gonna help me. I hear it's pretty flat there, too," Penny said, and was unsurprised when Sheldon moved to New York anyway.

She was a little startled when he took her with him, though.

 

3.

Brookhaven didn't have much by way of mountaineering prospects, but it was close to New York City, which Penny would've loved if she was still trying to make the actress thing work. It helped that they were still close to the ocean; their little rented house in Shoreham was fifteen minutes from the RHIC and within walking distance of Long Island Sound. Penny found a job at a nearby outfitter and went to work selling hiking boots, crampons, and kayaks.

She missed California and her apartment and Amy and Bernadette, and surprised herself by missing Leonard not at all. She was too busy for regrets, between the Alpine Shop and driving Sheldon to and from the Brookhaven labs and going shopping and cross-training and sending out emails to every commercial guiding agency that had a website in English.

"Did you know that four people died on Everest last year?" Sheldon told her one morning. "Technology can't save you when you have a death wish."

"I don't have a death wish," Penny said, and spat into the sink. "And can we maybe talk about this say, oh, never?"

"I simply think it's prudent for you to have all the facts before you throw yourself into this mad cry for attention. Where you not hugged enough as a child?" Alarmingly, Sheldon opened his arms and loomed behind her, like an ent decked out in a plaid bathrobe.

"Not a cry for attention," she mumbled around her toothbrush.

"Then the hug isn't necessary?"

Penny considered that—hugs from Sheldon were rarer than kisses—and tucked herself under Sheldon's arm long enough to receive an awkward pat on the shoulder. "Also," she said into his armpit, "you're the one financing this shindig."

"Well. You were quite convincing."

But she hadn't been, not really.

Their house had three bedrooms: the first was Penny's and the second and third were Sheldon's, one for sleeping and one for working. He worked longer hours in Brookhaven than he ever had in Pasadena, because, as he frequently reminded Penny, he was only rewriting the entirety of modern physics.

She wasn't sure what he was getting out of the whole deal. She already provided him with food and transportation, and she couldn't imagine what favor beyond that would be worth tens of thousands of wasted dollars to Sheldon. If he really was rewriting physics, he might finally get that Nobel he'd been talking about since she'd met him, but Penny figured he'd get one of those eventually whether he moved to Long Island or not. He was the smartest person she'd ever met, other than maybe Leslie Winkle. The both of them seemed more likely to tear themselves apart under the strain of their passions than the garden variety of scientist; Leonard was intelligent enough to distinguish himself and common enough to want a wife and kids and some semblance of balance.

That explained why Leslie Winkle preceded Sheldon to the Brookhaven National Laboratory, though. 

 

4.

Penny's first question after they'd finished unpacking was, "Why Shoreham?"

Sheldon, sitting with uncharacteristically poor posture that might have reflected exhaustion, looked puzzled. "It was within driving distance of my workplace."

"No, I mean—why New York? Why Long Island? Why that lab thingy?"

"Ah," Sheldon said. "I needed access to the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider."

"That really clears things up, thanks." Penny was sprawled at the other end of the couch, one of her legs hooked over the back and the other hanging off the side. She should probably be embarrassed that she was looking at Sheldon through her knees.

"Sarcasm?"

"Got it."

He favored her with an eloquent look that managed to express his low opinion of her intelligence, his certainty that she wouldn't understand anything he was about to say, and his determination to say it anyway (so she'd better pay attention). "I'm attempting to reconcile certain unexplained occurrences in the Standard Model of particle physics."

Oh. That was slightly less technical than she expected. "You know what," Penny said, and sat up to better study him. "You seem different here. More—something. And less something else."

"If I'm able to verify my current theory, I will be forced to rexamine the principles I've dedicated my entire life to exploring." Sheldon looked at his hands. 

"Well, you know what they say."

"No," Sheldon said. "Who are they?"

"They say that prison changes a man."

He twitched. "Am I going to prison?"

"No, Sheldon. It's an expression."

"I've never heard 'them' or indeed anyone use that expression before."

"You have now," Penny said firmly.

For a man so set in his ways, Sheldon constantly surprised her. Around the time Penny moved up to Class 5 climbs, she found out that he had a new research partner: Leslie Winkle.

"Oh, you've gotta be kidding me," she said, and thought about driving her car straight into the ocean.

"I would never kid about Leslie Winkle," Sheldon said with complete sincerity. It was long after sunset; she'd had to pry him out of his office and would probably have to remind him to eat three or four times before he'd think about touching dinner. If he kept forgetting to eat, she'd have to call his mother. Sheldon didn't have much body fat to spare.

"She isn't going to show up and murder us both in our sleep, is she?"

Sheldon, frighteningly, hesitated. "No."

"Sweetie, you better be damn sure of that, or I swear I'm turning this car around and we won't stop until we're on the other side of the country."

"I'm sure," he said. "For the time being, Dr. Winkle—dare I say it—needs my help."

"Oh my god," Penny said, when it dawned on her. "You're working with her _willingly_!"

Sheldon drew himself up in his seat, like he always did when he felt threatened—subconsciously trying to use his height to intimidate. The tactic never worked on Penny. "I'm generous enough to admit that occasionally it benefits me to be challenged."

"And Leslie Winkle challenges you?" Penny shrieked.

"She forces me to defend my ideas," Sheldon said, which was as good as a yes. Penny wasn't sure if she was more disturbed that he'd found someone who challenged him or that he'd found someone who _challenged_ him. 

"Of course," he continued, "she doesn't challenge me with the same frequency or intensity that you do."

"Oh," Penny said, and stared unseeing past the windshield.

"Why is the car stopping?" Sheldon demanded. "Did you forget to have your oil changed again?"

So those were the ways Sheldon changed, and the ways he didn't.

 

5.

She liked climbing. She liked the physical exertion of it, the wide-open sky above her and smooth rock beneath her hands. She liked the gentle ache her muscles took on in the evenings, a persistent tribute to memory that urged her off the sofa and into a series of gentle stretches while Sheldon poured over a sheaf of papers twice the size of a dictionary.

Penny was brutally reminded of her inexperience almost daily; she had the dedication, she had the physical ability, but when it came to assessing a slope, to stringing lines, even to tying her boots, she was years and sometimes decades behind the other members in her section of the AAC. Even if she could borrow the money from Sheldon for Everest, it was doubtful she'd be able to afford any other high-altitude trips. At least she could work at the technical skills.

"I'm going to pay you back," she told Sheldon over dinner. They were eating off their knees and watching _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_ , which was one of the few shows they both passionately liked. (Penny was kind of getting into the National Geographic channel, though.)

Sheldon picked over his mi krop with the concentration of a prospector. He'd come home with an even more mulish expression than usual. Penny was pretty sure he'd had another argument with Leslie, but she didn't want to ask—she had a fantastic streak of avoiding Leslie, both in conversation and in person.

"Pay me back for what?" Sheldon said. "Leaving your wet towel on the bathroom floor?"

"No, brain bank, for the money you're making by rewriting physics." 'Rewriting physics' had become their shorthand for 'that thing you're doing that came with a pay raise and a move to the opposite coast.' Sheldon tried at least once a week to explain what 'rewriting physics' meant in greater detail, but Penny started talking about shoe sales in retaliation and Sheldon knocked that off pretty quick.

"I'm not concerned with that," Sheldon said. And the weird thing was—he wasn't. For all of his many and obnoxious neuroses, he was the most startlingly generous man Penny knew. He also measured the distance she could stand from the bathroom mirror, so she figured God had to give him some really good traits to make up for all the really anal ones.

"I don't care," Penny said. Sheldon probably pulled a face, but she deliberately kept her eyes on the screen, and maybe a little bit on her chopsticks—she was getting better with vegetables, but noodles ended up on her shirt sooner or later.

"So I talked to Bernadette today," she said.

Sheldon ate a piece of broccoli.

"She and Howard are back together," Penny prompted.

Sheldon ate another piece of broccoli.

"They're getting heavy on the wedding planning," Penny tried.

"Must you speak through the entire episode?"

"Isn't that why you keep the subtitles on? So I can talk?" Their TV here wasn't as sleek as the one back home, but it was still big enough that Leonard without his glasses could read the captions.

"Irrelevant," Sheldon said, and inhaled another mouthful.

"Uh, yeah, pretty sure one of your best friends getting married isn't irrelevant. What if Howard asks you to be one of his groomsmen? Hey, Bernadette might ask me to be a bridesmaid."

"Frankly, I don't understand the emphasis our culture places on"—he actually set his takeout box in his lap to make air quotes—"'romantic love' and 'marriage.'"

"Sheldon, that's because your heart is three sizes too small."

"My heart is a perfectly healthy size, and marriage should be nothing more than a legal and procreative contract."

"I always wanted a big wedding," Penny said, ignoring Sheldon like it was her god-given right. "The big dress, the fancy reception, one of those cakes with tiers...my parents' house has this enormous staircase, and I always imagined walking down those stairs and having the ceremony right there in the living room. It sounds pretty small-town now, though." Which made her sad; as she grew up she felt she should be thinking bigger—on the beach, in a field of wildflowers, on the front steps of her husband-to-be's mansion—but instead she found she could barely imagine herself getting married at all. Rather than broadening her horizons, experience had only narrowed them.

"Did you know that marriage once meant a woman was her husband's property?"

"Wow, you are really determined to rain on the marriage parade," Penny said, but mildly, since she was pretty sure the wedding train had left her at the station. Not that she was bitter. Because she wasn't. Besides, it wasn't like that was the only train that had passed long ago.

"I fail to see how marriage is worth a parade," Sheldon said. "That would be my point."

"You know what, why don't we watch the show. I can't stand it when you talk over the dialogue." 

"There's hardly any dialogue in this episode," Sheldon said. "This is the Emmy-award nominated 'Hush,' which I believe you've seen _twice_."

"That was sarcasm, Sheldon."

"I don't think it was," he said. After he finished eating, he vanished into his bedroom. Penny was even more certain that he'd argued with Leslie; it wasn't like Sheldon really cared about weddings one way or the other, of course.

 

6.

By the following summer she was going on regular trips with the AAC to the White Mountains and sometimes further south to the Appalachians, where the tallest peaks were still under seven thousand feet but where there were plenty of rock faces to build experience. Sheldon started spending his nights at work. She stopped by when he hadn't surfaced for three days and found his office empty, but with the new addition of a cot in the back corner beneath a whiteboard. She hoped he hadn't gone crazy and run off to work on a train or something—that was just what she needed, Sheldon having a mid-life career crisis. 

No Sheldon meant one unfortunate thing. She stopped an older woman in the hall and asked for directions to Dr. Winkle.

"Oh, Leslie?" the woman said, and peered over her glasses at Penny in the manner of academics and librarians across the world. "She'll be, let's see...have you checked with Dr. Cooper?"

"I'm actually looking for Sheldon," Penny said. "I thought Leslie might know where he is?"

"Like peas in a pod, those two," Dr. Whatsherface said. Penny didn't appreciate the comparison. "Leslie's office is just down the hall, or they might be in one of the east wing labs, or the dining hall, I suppose."

"You know what, I think I can manage," Penny said with a tight smile, and marched off in what she hoped was the right direction. Like peas in a pod, yeah right. More like...sticks of dynamite...in a pod, what the hell ever. She didn't care if Sheldon wanted to professionally canoodle with Jesus himself.

After taking three wrong turns and losing track of Sheldon's office entirely, Penny finally located a door marked "Leslie Winkle, Ph.D." and underneath, in smaller letters, "Particle Physics." She beat Sheldon's triple knock out of habit and, when no answer came, twisted the knob and stuck her head inside.

A head of dark, curly hair was slumped against a desk that came straight out of _Mad Man_ , side bar not included. Leslie's outstretched hand still clutched her thick glasses; the walls were covered not with the expected whiteboards, but rather old-fashioned chalkboards. 

Penny sneezed. Leslie didn't stir.

She'd never gotten along with Dr. Winkle, even once she'd let go of her jealousy over Leonard, and she couldn't imagine what the other woman was doing in New York. Leslie wasn't in the same field as Sheldon, to the best of Penny's limited knowledge, and she'd always treated him like a piece of dog crap that had regrettably attached itself to her shoe. Sheldon responded with a similar, slightly less dispassionate courtesy. 

"Penny?"

"Jesus, Sheldon, don't do that!" she hissed, startled enough that she twisted around like a cat. He was carrying one of the cheap composition books all the boys preferred and wearing a pair of reading glasses. She'd never seen him in glasses before.

"I've never seen you in glasses before."

He reached around her to pull Leslie's door shut, and then stepped away. "I don't need them."

"Uh huh," Penny said, and pushed them up his nose where they'd started to slip down. "They why are you wearing them?"

"It was an experiment to see if they'd relieve my tension headache."

"You know what'd really relieve your tension headache?" Penny said.

"Black cohosh?"

"Sleep," Penny said, and herded him towards the car.

He trailed a step and a half behind her, hovering just over her left shoulder; she let him pick up his bag and another stack of notebooks from his office, made him take off the glasses, and shoved him bodily into the car when he got wind of another idea and tried to bolt back inside.

"New rule: I pick you up at six even if you tell me not to," Penny said.

"I don't like that rule," he said, but she'd argued with Sheldon before and he was seriously off his game. He wasn't pitching a fit worthy of a three-year-old, and he wasn't breaking out the brutal logic he fell back on when he really wanted something. He was probably too tired. 

"Tough. I don't like the rule you made about washing my hands right when I get home, but I haven't caught a cold this year, have I?"

He didn't answer; when she looked over he was staring out the window, eyebrows creased, lost in a universe of his own.

 

7.

After that she scheduled her shifts to finish by five, so she never had the excuse of work to neglect Sheldon. She worried about him when she was away on her climbing trips; after a five-day trek to the Cathedral Ledge rock face, she'd come home to a man who hadn't shaved or _eaten_ in two days. From then on she made him set alarms on his watch, so he'd remember to check in with her.

The less he cared about his rituals, the more driven she was to follow them. All of them. The meal plan, the bathroom schedule, _Terra Nova_ on Monday and comic books on Wednesday and paint ball every weekend the weather held. She brought him tea when he looked stressed, set the Tivo when he forgot, and deliberately spilled nail polish on his computer just so he'd take a break.

When he continued to push himself to the limits of endurance, she stopped being accommodating and starting being obnoxious. She opened the battle by deleting his recordings of PBS specials to make room for _My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic_. That backfired when she found him watching Rainbow Dash practice for the Wonderbolts at two in the morning. Also, their living room floor was covered in marbles.

"Oh god, not the marbles again," she groaned.

Sheldon looked up. "Penny! Come watch with me. I think you'll find that you relate to Rarity."

"Okay, first of all: I have to be up in five hours. And I'm Applejack, not Rarity!"

He squinted at her. "Maybe you're an Applejack who aspires to be a Rarity?"

"Shut up, Twilight Sparkle," she said, and went to sit on the couch, where she watched him push around marbles for twenty minutes before falling asleep. When she woke up, the marbles were gone and a plate of bacon and eggs was waiting for her on the coffee table.

When the pony thing didn't work, she turned to attacking his hygiene. She sneezed on his toothbrush, she peeled off band-aids under his nose, and once she even ate a piece of chicken satay off his plate. He didn't flinch. 

_P.S. Sheldon is being weirder than usual_ , she told Bernadette in an email mostly dedicated to discussing Howard's failings. (They were off again this week.) _It's like he's starting to live entirely inside his head, and I can't snap him out of it._

 _Did you try sneezing on his toothbrush?_ Bernadette wrote back. 

_No dice_ , Penny said.

Bernadette responded with a written shrug. _It could be worse,_ she said. _I'm almost sure Amy is sleeping with Leonard. Talk about weird._

Penny wondered what Sheldon would think if he knew Amy and Leonard were having sex. Maybe that would break him out of his stuck-ness.

Weirdly, she kind of hoped it wouldn't.

 

8.

"Why don't we go to the comic book store?" Penny tried.

Sheldon kept picking away at his keyboard, but at least he answered. "I'm mad at DC."

"About the reboot thing? Still?" She painted her pinky toe. With all the time she spent outside, her nail polish lasted approximately two days before it chipped off, but she kept buying new bottles of Passionberry Pink and Give-Him-Hell Red anyway.

Sheldon didn't answer. Penny painted her middle toe and thought about her reaction; she was starting to wonder if she was worried about him for his sake or her own. He'd never refused to pay her attention before.

Well, whatever. They were friends—they were _roommates_ —and friends put up with each other.

That was when she had the idea.

"Sheldon? Hey, Sheldon?"

"What?"

"I have a question. Actually, it's more like a favor."

"If you're going to make a formal request, you should convene an emergency meeting per the roommate agreement."

Penny rapped the bottle of polish against her open palm to shake it and started on her other foot. "Yeah, I never signed that, remember?"

"Oh, I forged your signature," Sheldon said absently, like it was something he did every day, like it didn't go against every tenet of order and common sense.

"You...Sheldon, you can't just forge my signature! People don't do that!"

"I beg to differ."

"Isn't that like...lying on paper? Do you want me to call your mom?"

"It isn't a liberty I would normally take, but it was your signature," he said, as if that explained anything.

Penny realized she was dripping nail polish on the rug. "Wouldn't you care if somebody forged your name?"

"Not if you were doing the forging," he said.

"What," Penny said. "I...what?" She stuck the brush back in the bottle, screwed it in, and shook her head. "Look, just don't do it again, okay? Unless it's FedEx."

"Didn't you have something to ask?"

"Oh, right. So my Alpine Club is having a black-tie fundraiser, and I was wondering if you—"

"No."

"Aw, Sheldon, come on, please? I'll owe you one."

He set his laptop aside, laced his fingers over his knee, and turned to her. "And I suppose I'll be paid back with a check I have to keep in my desk and never cash?"

"Wow," Penny said, stung although she knew he was just irritated at being interrupted. "And here I thought you might actually like going with me, you giant dictator."

"—You're asking me to go with you?"

"No, Sheldon, I'm asking if you'll be my chauffeur. Yes, I'm asking you to go with me!"

"In that case, I accept your invitation!"

"Maybe I don't feel like going any more!" Some distant part of Penny's brain asked why they were shouting; the rest of her was drifting into fantasies about cattle roping.

"Maybe I don't want you to go!"

"Maybe I'll go with you anyway, then!"

"Fine!"

"Fine!" Penny hollered. She had one knee on the couch and one foot on the floor and she was close enough to Sheldon's face to lick it.

"Fine," he said; Penny growled and slammed off to shower, where she played Shania Twain on the bathroom radio and sang along at the top of her lungs.

She didn't realize what a horrible idea it was to invite Sheldon as her (platonic) date until the next morning. It was a _really_ horrible idea—maybe the worst idea she'd ever had, considering what had happened the day before they moved in together.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Not intended to be taken seriously by anyone living or dead. My qualifications for writing about this topic are legitimate in that I have read books (seven books) about mountains and in that I sometimes climb stairs. 
> 
> Last chapter was edited for science! and continuity. Please disregard my completely tragic timeline and, if you are feeling especially kind, pretend that I know a little about science! and mountaineering.
> 
> My love as always to Odyle, who understands more about hyphens than probably anyone else in this universe.

9.

She didn't have to take him shopping again, thank god for enormous favors, because his mother sent his tuxedo up from Texas. Sheldon thought the tux looked tawdry—really, "That's too expensive for one color" explained _so much_ about the way Sheldon dressed—but he didn't bitch when she made him put on the bowtie. He was at a stage where he scribbled notes on anything that was close at hand and stood still long enough; when she came out of the bathroom, the pencil in his hand was veering dangerously close to the wall. She snatched it away and then balanced against his shoulder as she put on her heels.

"There," she said, and wriggled her toes a little to make sure her foot was in place. They turned to inspect each other.

Sheldon was devastating in a tuxedo. Most men were, but he was more than most, long and wiry and with just the right shoulder-to-waist ratio to invite touch. He'd be acceptable arm candy, provided he didn't open his mouth.

"You look handsome," Penny said.

Sheldon frowned, slid his hands into his pockets, and then took them back out again. "Thank you."

"And..."

"And?"

"You know what, never mind," Penny said, and taking his arm, led him to the cab.

The ballroom was resplendent with white fairy lights and an elaborate fondue fountain straight out of _Gossip Girl_. Penny tried not to look over-awed; she suspected she failed miserably. Sheldon didn't seem to notice his surroundings at all except to ask how the champagne glasses had been sanitized. She left him to prop up a wall and went forth to mingle.

A group of older couples swallowed her first, and then spit her up into the enthusiastic arms of the section secretary, who had just returned from the Andes and who seemed to have an endless album of photographs on the tiny, brilliant screen of her phone. After forty minutes Penny used Sheldon as an excuse and abandoned the impromptu slideshow for the ladies' room.

In an hour and a half, Sheldon didn't move from his post at the door. Penny stopped by briefly to make sure he hadn't turned into a statue; he told her that he was thinking about Hamiltonian mechanics and asked if she would get him a glass of water.

"Some date you are," Penny said, and went back to the fondue fountain. Across the table a sandy-haired man with rimless glasses met her eyes; she smiled at him, and he dropped his plate into the fondue.

"Whoops," Penny said.

"Guess I won't be double dipping," the guy said, with just a hint of an English accent. "You haven't registered that as a lethal weapon, have you?"

She should've seen it coming, but instead she said, "Registered what?" and the guy flashed his teeth and said, "Your smile," and that was how she met Peter Bartholomew. He would've been arrogant, if the glasses hadn't made him self-deprecating and if he hadn't walked with a limp from an old accident. Penny left that night with his phone number and tried to use it as a buoy against her disappointment. Sheldon didn't speak the whole way home.

The worst part was that she'd believed her own delusions; she knew Sheldon as well as anyone could know him, and somehow she'd still thought—thought that—

"Don't you have anything to say?"

Sheldon busied himself with unthreading his cufflinks. Penny waited while he unfastened first one and then the other. She didn't feel angry with him, only that gentle, expectant sadness.

"Will you bring me a glass of water now?"

Stupid, she thought. "No, Sheldon, you can get your own water. I'll start your teapot, though," she added, so he wouldn't think she was mad at him. It was ridiculous to be mad at Sheldon for acting like himself—it was like being mad at snow for being cold, or at a stone for being hard. 

"Don't bother," he said. His head was off somewhere else already as his fingers worried the knot at his throat. Penny set her clutch on the kitchen table and kicked off her heels. Before he disappeared into his office, he paused and put one hand on the doorframe.

"Penny?"

She glanced over her shoulder.

"I believe the convention is to say—you look luminous," he said.

Long after he had vanished behind the door, Penny stood with her mouth open. ("Stop catching flies," her mother's voice told her.) 

"Fuck," she said.

Before she went to bed she brought him a glass of water, even though she was still kind of annoyed at him.

 

10.

Sometimes, when she climbed, she had time to think.

Often she didn't. Often, the rigor of the task itself demanded her full concentration, and if her focus wavered it meant the chance of skidding down two hundred feet of sheer rock until even that gave way and she would find herself jerked to a halt at the end of her tether, swaying in mid-air while her harness rode up her ass. Once in a blue moon, though, she'd fall into a rhythm, let her hands take care of their business while she turned over some nagging thought in the hope that worry might force it to yield a solution.

She thought about: Nebraska. Her parents, and why she'd left them. How much waitressing sucked. Why nobody had invented a nail polish that wouldn't chip. Acting, and the pursuit thereof. Why Sheldon was such a drama llama. Tenzing Norgay. The sky. Weddings. Failure.

When you started spending a lot of time with yourself after years of avoiding anything that required more self-reflection than reading the horoscope, you started to find out what kind of person you really were. Penny had discovered she was mostly the kind of person who, even after abandoning her whole life not once but _twice_ , was still resilient enough to concern herself with nail polish.

And then there was the other thing, the thing with Sheldon. He was startlingly outside of Penny's experience, somehow the most maddening and yet the most constant person in her life. She had never been so comfortable—no, that wasn't the right word; she had never felt so _fearless_ as she did with him. 

She wedged herself in a crevice and thought about that while she chewed on a power bar. Sheldon drove her nuts, and she liked it, and that was...well, it was something. 

The next day, she said, "I think Leonard and Amy are having sex," just to gauge Sheldon’s reaction.

He pulled his attention away from one of his thick science magazines, the kind that came out forty times a year and had no pictures that weren’t graphs, with obvious effort, and stared heavy-lidded at Penny. "And?"

"And...Amy was a girl who was your friend."

He continued to look at her with all the comprehension of a housecat faced with a Rubik's Cube.

"How does it make you _feel_ , Sheldon," she prompted.

His attention sharpened in a way that made Penny sure he was searching for what she thought was the appropriate emotional response rather than what he actually felt.

"Look, sweetie, it’s not a multiple choice test. You don’t have to feel jealous or whatever, I’m just asking if you do."

"Oh," he said, processing that. "No." And then he turned back to his stupid physics journal. That was the problem with Sheldon: Even if she did, maybe, just a little, think about him _like that_ , he didn’t want to be _like that_. 

She’d never entirely believed Raj’s line about Sheldon being asexual, despite knowing a few aces who were a part of her community theater group back in Pasadena. Sheldon was emotionally stunted, yes, and repressed, _deliberately_ repressed, willfully so, as if he’d simply made up his mind that romance had no role in his life. In fact, that seemed like exactly the kind of thing he’d do, even if Penny suspected that his decision was subconsciously driven by his parents’ crappy relationship and the sort of developmental stall-out that probably went along with starting college at eleven.

Or maybe that was wishful thinking. She was wishful; it used to be one of her better qualities.

"I’m going for a run," she announced. Sheldon stirred not a whit.

She went and dragged her running shoes out from under the bed, and then she ran, six miles out to the sea and six miles back. It wasn’t enough to wind her. She was in the best shape of her life.

 

11.

Peter-from-the-gala had taken to dropping by Penny's work. He wasn't the only one; there were a handful of AAC members who congregated there on slow afternoons and weekends when the weather was bad. They told tall tales and poked through equipment and ate Clif Bars like there was a famine on, which Penny's boss didn't mind since most of them were his friends and proteges. They also tended to poke fun at Penny, rookie that she was, and never more than when they heard why she'd taken up climbing.

"Skip it," was Ed's opinion. "Stick to rock faces. Any idiot with enough money can get to the top of Everest these days. Speed ascents, now that's where it's at."

"You're an idiot," said Fatima, who spent more time in the Alps than she did her own home. "If the girl likes high altitudes, let her at 'em."

"She's barely been above sea level," Ed protested. "She doesn't know _what_ she likes. Everest is a fuckin’ tourist trap anyway."

Peter had been quiet throughout, watching as Penny restocked sleeping bags, but when Fatima and Ed wandered away—in search of Clif Bars, no doubt—he said, "You're serious about the Everest thing."

"Yeah, I am."

"I've got someone you should meet, then. Are you busy this week?"

"With work, but—" Penny shrugged one shoulder. "You know."

"Fatima and I are flying out west for a few days. Come with us."

"Oh, I don't..." 

Peter stuck his hands in his pockets; a forelock of hair flopped over his brow, and the way he peered at her over his glasses made her think of Sheldon and his readers. "Fatima has her own plane. I guarantee it'll be worth your time."

"ILARI!" Penny shouted. "Ilari, can I take next week off?"

There was a moment of hanging silence, and then from across the empty store came her boss's voice. "Find someone to cover your Friday!"

"THANKS. Georgia owes me," she added to Peter. "I covered last month when she wanted to go on that ski trip. When do we leave?"

"Tomorrow," Peter said, and Penny groaned and threw a hiking boot at his head.

They flew out early in Fatima's little single-engine, the owner herself in the pilot's seat and Peter riding shotgun—or co-pilot, Penny guessed. She folded herself into the back and spent most of the pre-flight composing an email to Sheldon. Now that they shared a phone plan, she piggybacked on his data. He'd insisted after her crappy prepaid Samsung had died the last death on a recent trip to the Tetons.

They arrived in Washington state both cranky and wired. Penny wasn't expected anyone to meet them at the airport, but there was a woman there, nut-brown, wiry, at least ten years older than Penny and with a pair of wide athletic sunglasses obscuring half her face.

And that was how Penny met Era Dervishi, who had at least as much of an impact on Penny's life as her own mother.

Era was absurd, sharp-tongued but not unkind, and possessed of the kind of experience Penny associated with legends. She guided for Rainier Mountaineering, Inc. for her paycheck, and climbed eight-thousanders without supplemental oxygen in her downtime. By dawn the next day Era had bundled them all into cold-weather gear and installed them on the Coleman route of Mount Baker, where she bombarded Penny with information so ferociously Penny would've cried if she hadn't been used to Sheldon.

When Penny finally managed to fit in a question about where they'd be camping, Era laughed in her face.

"It's only a sixteen hour climb to the top," Era said. "Now come here, show me how you self-arrest."

"I'm going to get frostbite just to spite you," Penny said.

"I'd like to see you try to flip me the bird with amputated fingers," Era said. "Self-arrest. What's the method?"

Penny groaned again, but she bore Era's corrections attentively. After arrests they talked about belays and half a dozen other techniques Penny had thought she’d known, and then they talked about Penny's ability on rock (decent, in Era's assessment, as least for someone completely new to the sport) and her lack of ability on ice (Era sneered). It wasn't until they were well into the descent, somewhere after the twentieth consecutive hour of climbing, that Penny learned Era was putting together an expedition to Nepal for next year.

"You do whatever I tell you, is that clear? I say turn around fifty feet from the summit, you say yes ma'am, is that clear?"

"Ma'am, yes ma'am," Penny rattled off, still a little dumbstruck and more than a little exhausted. 

"Good. I'll put you on the waiting list. And because I like you, I'll give you some advice: keep a journal."

"Okay," Penny said.

"And get some sponsors if you're serious," Era added. "This is one fucking expensive hobby, girlie."

 

12\. 

They landed in New York with just enough time for Penny to crank her car to life and drive straight for Brookhaven. She hoped Sheldon had been getting rides home at night. She hoped he hadn't been sleeping in his office. She hoped he hadn't overdosed on aspirin. That was a thing, right, people could overdose on aspirin? They swallowed half the bottle because they lost track of how many pills they'd taken and then they had a heart attack—or no, that couldn't be right, aspirin helped prevent heart attacks, or...something.

At Brookhaven, her feet, which until that moment she had regarded as highly dependable, carried her not to Dr. Cooper's office but to Dr. Winkle's.

"Oh hey, Nebraska Barbie! Come on in," Leslie said. She was tossing stuff into a box: books, calculators, sheaves of paper, action figures, spare glasses, staplers and plaques rubbing against CDs and mechanical pencils with no regard for propriety. 

"You're packing?" Penny said.

"Yeah, I'm done with this popsicle joint. I got everything I wanted out of Doctor Loretan on quasiparticles, and Captain Incapable got everything he wanted out of me on spacetime symmetries. His work's good, but don't tell him I said so."

"No inflating Sheldon's ego, check." She shifted her weight and thought about sitting down, aware of the muscle ache deep in her left hip, and of the weight of her dirty braid against the back of her neck. "So, hey!" (Too perky, she thought. Too perky, what the hell did that even mean?) "There's been something I've been wanting to ask you..."

"Cooper's not half bad in the sack, if you can deal with his giant bundle of neuroses and a pretty appalling personality," Leslie said. "Oh hey, so that's where those freeze-dried bananas went. Wonder if these things have an expiration date."

Penny's throat worked, desperate for moisture, but her mouth was wrung-out. Completely dry.

Leslie winked.

"I...no. I just sorta wondered—how did he get you to work with him?"

For the first time, she had Dr. Winkle's full attention. The other woman tucked her hands in her pockets, rocked back on her heels and then forward in a way that reminded Penny of those little weighted birds that sat on the rim of fancy martini glasses in old movies—and, presumably, at least once upon a time in real life. "What makes you think he asked me?" Leslie finally said.

"Because I don't think he hates you half as much as you hate him."

That startled one gulp of a laugh out of Leslie. "Listen," she said. "Cooper's a misogynistic backwoods Texas asshat, which I feel only really comes to the surface after you spend some time with him. At least five minutes, you know? But occasionally there's a diamond buried in the spew of diarrhea that comes out of his mouth, and that's why I got into this circus."

"For the diamonds?" 

"For the diamond-like excrement that Cooper sometimes produces, yeah. Anyway, he didn’t ask. I offered."

"That's..." Penny didn't even know what to do with that.

"Don't worry too much about it, blondie," Leslie advised. "Better women than you have tried and failed to crack that nut."

Penny drew herself up and said, "No. They haven’t."

"Yeah?" Dr. Winkle squinted at her and then flashed her teeth. "Maybe not. And this has been fun, so don’t let the door hit you on the ass on your way out."

"Thanks. I guess," Penny said, and walked away.

Funny. The ache in her hip had vanished entirely.

She made several (dozen) wrong turns on her way to Sheldon and somehow found herself in a building housing the National Weather Service, where half a dozen meteorologists tripped over themselves to give her better directions. (She had to pass by Leslie's office _again_ after that; the door was closed and no lights were shining from under it.) Sheldon's door was also shut, but there was a streak of illumination coming through the crack.

Penny knocked three times and checked her watch, which told her it was well after six. "Sheldon?" she called.

"Enter," his voice said.

She swung the door wide and found him at his desk, the heels of his hands pressed to his temples. "Hey, tiger," she said. "I ran into Leslie, she mentioned she's leaving?"

"Yes," Sheldon said.

Penny swing her hands together and grimaced expectantly, but Sheldon failed to catch the conversation ball altogether. "Well! That was a dead-end. Come on, time for dinner."

At last he looked at her; his eyes were bloodshot, and he had a smear of ink up one arm nearly to his elbow. "Penny. You've returned from Washington."

"Yep."

"You're unharmed?"

"Completely intact."

"Mm," Sheldon said. "You can go now."

"...What?"

"I have work to finish," he said. "Why don't you run along home." She heard his mother in that, and saw Mary in the way he flicked his hand at the door.

The easiest thing would be to get angry, to get mad and yell and demand his attention or at least a lick of politeness, but instead Penny said, "Nope," and dropped her ass down into the chair in front of his desk. He didn't chastise her; already he'd drifted back to his notes.

She gave him five minutes and then said, "So why dontcha have a computer? Do they only let the big boy scientists have the fun toys?"

The air in the room developed a sudden wind chill. Sheldon lowered his hands, first the left and then the right, before he lifted his eyes to meet hers. It always startled her—how she could forget the blue lash of his eyes.

 _"I prefer to work longhand,"_ he hissed.

Penny studied him as he glared, taking in the ageless planes of his face, how his hair had grown enough to brush over his ears, the new gauntness of his cheeks and the cavernous set of his eye sockets. Finally she said, "Look, Sheldon. I'm tired, and you're being...you, so I'm going to explain this as plainly as possible. I understand that I'm interrupting you, but you're being rude. I'm not taking your crap and I'm not going to let you abuse yourself, and right now I doubt you slept at all while I was gone. Take a break, eat, sleep for a few hours, and then go back at it."

He blinked and said, without the whine of protest she would've have expected, "I need neither a mother nor a babysitter."

"No," Penny said. "You don't. But while you clearly don't care if you solve this problem and then drop dead, I do. I want...I don't want you hurting yourself, okay?"

"In that case—" He sat back and tilted his head. She felt a surge of something familiar, that recurring tide of complete foreignness that often washed over her when she was reminded that she and Sheldon existed in complete opposition. The gulf between them contained much more than a desk.

"In that case," he said, "I think that in all fairness you should consider what I have to say about the statistically significant peril of Himalayan climbing at least once."

"Yeah. Yeah, okay," Penny said, and sighed.

 

13.

They ate leftovers in their living room and afterward drank sweet, hot tea, and when Sheldon had regained some color Penny drained her cup to the dregs, set it aside, and said, "All right, lay it on me."

Sheldon curled his hands over his kneecaps. He always looked weird when he sat on couches or low easy chairs, his legs so long that the knees were almost always at a higher altitude than his hips.

"And," Penny added, "keep in mind that this is probably something that I know more than you about, buster."

"Fine. I assume you’re still determined to join this ridiculous expedition next spring?"

"Uh, yeah."

"Why?"

Penny sensed a trap. "Because...the people I’m going with actually know what they’re doing, and I’d be stupid to turn them down?"

"No, I mean why are you hell-bent on risking yourself to get to the top of a mountain that has been summited thousands of times already?"

"Because it’s there?" Penny tried.

"And what is the context of that particular quote?"

"Oh god, Sheldon, not another test. Ugh. It was Hillary, right? First guy to climb Everest?" She walked her fingers up her thigh, a little mountaineer in miniature. 

"No," Sheldon said. "It was Sir George Mallory, who responded ‘Because it is there’ when a journalist asked him why he was determined to risk his life getting to the top. Do you know what happened to Mallory, Penny? He died. He and his partner climbed to 27,000 feet and then they vanished. Seventy-five years later they found his body frozen to the moutainside."

"That was a century ago, Sheldon, I think our technology’s improved a little bit since then. There are hundreds of people who make it to the top and back down every year now, you know, _alive_."

"Which in no way makes it _safe_. In 1996 eight people died in one day. At least that many have already died this year. You’ll be quite literally climbing over their bodies in pursuit of the summit."

"Are you telling me you’d let that stop you?"

It wouldn’t, and they both knew it; but then Sheldon blindsided her by saying, "Consider that Mallory had a _wife_."

She was struck in that moment by the thought that, long after the news of her husband's death had been delivered by telegram, Ruth Mallory could very well have still received mail from him weeks and even months later—letters from a man long lost that would for the barest fraction of a second raise her hopes before dashing them all over again.

Penny stood up and walked out of the room. In the kitchen, she took a glass from the cupboard, filled it at the sink, and drank it down without pausing to breathe. When she went back, Sheldon was sitting in the same spot, his spot, his new spot which was not _at all_ like his old spot in Pasadena.

"I don't know why I said that," he told her.

"I don't know either," Penny said. "But you asked me to listen, and I heard you, okay? This is dangerous. I understand that it's dangerous. I'm going to do it anyway, _but_ —I promise that if the risk seems too high, if it seems like I'm taking unacceptable risks because I'm desperate to get to the top, I promise that I'll turn around and come home."

"I don't want you to solve this problem and then drop dead," he said, and then ruined it by adding,"You know how hard it is for me to find friends, Penny. It would be a waste of my valuable time to have to find a replacement for you."

Or maybe he didn't ruin it. There was a tightness at the corners of his mouth that suggested he already knew there was no replacement for her at all.

 

14\. 

The next months she and Sheldon orbited the house like planetary bodies, sometimes passing close enough to send out a signal but more often than not missing each other entirely. Penny worked more hours when she was home but was home less often, flying out with Fatima to meet Peter or Ed or Era for long weekends and longer weeks of driving her body to the brink. Sheldon went to work and then home and then to work again, where when Penny was gone he badgered or bribed passage home from his coworkers, and, once, called a cab. Penny didn't ask how that day went, but one week later a bicycle appeared on their porch. In fair weather the ride from Shoreham to Brookhaven took him forty-five minutes. He liked, he said, the time it gave him to think.

And then it was December.

"Hey," Penny said. "Leonard's flying out to Jersey to see his parents over Christmas."

Sheldon flipped his eggs and added a dash of salt. 

"I sorta told him he could stay with us for a few days, that okay?"

"The common areas are half yours to allocate. He won't be sleeping in my bed, though." 

"Yeah, well, he's not sleeping in mine either." Penny jabbed at the coffee maker and then swore when she jammed her splinted ring finger. She'd done something to it last week. It didn't feel broken, but it hurt like hell. "We'll put him in the spare bedroom."

"That isn't a spare bedroom, Penny, that's my home office!"

She flapped a hand at him. "It's fine, we'll just move some of my gear." Her climbing equipment had taken up an increasing amount of space in the third bedroom, something that Sheldon—contrary to his usual territorial streak—hadn't bothered to complain about at all. She should move all her junk to the garage or basement, she knew, but the lighting was so much better upstairs...

Sheldon grunted at her. She rolled her eyes and asked, "Need a ride to work?"

Improbably, his expression grew even more mulish. "They're still drilling away at the parking lot outside my building."

"Don't forget to eat," she said automatically. "I might swing by the store on the way home, call if you want take-out, and do _not_ say anything about Leonard on Facebook—he still hasn't told his mom. She is creepily obsessed with him staying in his childhood bedroom. Yuck."

Sheldon had returned to staring at his robot toaster, the one that made faces on the toast. He was lost to her again, caught in some distant world that whirled far beyond Penny's understanding. She picked idly at the cracked skin on her fingertips while she waited for his toast to finish; when it popped up she laid it out on a plate, picked up his slack hand, and folded a butter knife into his fingers.

"Hey," she said. "Breakfast."

Sheldon blinked twice before he managed to train his eyes on her face. "Yes," he said.

Penny rolled her eyes again and went to shower.

-

Leonard appeared on their doorstep three days before Christmas; Penny was still drowsing, savoring one of her rare mornings off and rationalizing that it was too icy out to go running anyway, when Sheldon answered the door. 

"Hey, Sheldon," she heard Leonard say, and then Sheldon answered, "Hello, Leonard. May I offer you a beverage?" which was a guest ritual, the guest ritual. She'd never heard him use it on Leonard before, and abruptly she was awake enough to hate Leonard’s presence. Penny was becoming someone new, and Leonard was something old, a remnant, like Kurt, like hemorrhoid commercials, like Nebraska. Leonard was an intruder, and in that moment Penny felt every bit as jealous as Sheldon at his territorial worst.

—But then Leonard's voice drifted up the stairs: "I like the nail polish splatters on the couch. Very bohemian."

"Leonard, since you are hardly an expert in interior design, I am forced to conclude that you are using sarcasm at Penny's expense. In that case, well done. I told her to take her manicures to the kitchen table, but did she listen? No."

"Naw, it's a Penny original. Someday you'll be able to sell this couch on eBay for thousands of dollars, you watch."

Sheldon sniffed and repeated, "May I offer you a beverage?"

"Got any Yoo-hoo?"

"'Got any Yoo-hoo?' Are you being sarcastic again?"

"Nice to see you too, buddy." Their voices lowered to a murmur as they went through the swinging door into the kitchen. Penny grinned into her pillow; she had been thinking, lately, that maybe it wasn't necessary to throw away all of who she had been on the way to who she was becoming.

She dragged herself to the kitchen, stopping on the way to root around in Sheldon’s bedroom for his tablet; she had at least five million emails waiting for responses, many of them instructions from Era ( _familiarize yourself with this model of oxygen tank, buy that kind of dex, meet me in Queens next week to meet my journalist friend, remember that this trip is actually a favor _for_ my journalist friend and that letting him get the story he wants takes priority, study these maps, are you lifting weights, are you biking, do you understand how physically grueling this will be, and listen here, girlie…_ ), although she knew she was far more likely to eat pancakes and gossip about Howard and Bernadette with Leonard than she was to do any of the dozen things she should be doing on her day off—things like responding to emails.

When she caught sight of herself in the mirror at the foot of the stairs and took in her rat’s-nest of hair, the healing scrape low on her jaw, the holes in her CLINTON 2016 tee, and the too-large slippers that she’d liberated from Sheldon, she did not think about retreating to her vanity to make herself pretty.

The boys were deep in one of their sciencey discussions. To Leonard’s credit, he broke off long enough to greet her. Penny pecked him on the cheek, dropped Sheldon’s tablet on the counter, and went to interface with the coffee maker, choosing to ignore that it was closer to lunch than breakfast. She must’ve spaced out, because when the BREWING light flashed at her Sheldon was pushing his way into the room again, carrying one of those cheap composition books that reminded Penny of adolescent spy movies.

"I swear, Sheldon, if this turns out to be another set up for a joke about Euler’s formula…"

"You asked what I’ve been working on," Sheldon said, and slid the notebook across the table.

"I didn’t want a dissertation, but I should’ve seen it coming," Leonard said under his breath. He flipped through the first couple of pages, and then something caught his attention, because he slowed to study the next few pages in more detail, glanced up at Sheldon, and began to read from the beginning in earnest.

Penny was on her second cup of coffee by the time he finished. There was a little bird hopping around on their windowsill—some kind of sparrow, maybe? Sheldon would probably know, although if he didn’t know he’d just make something up to convince her he was a certified bird expert…

"Jesus, Sheldon." Leonard pushed his glasses up his forehead and rubbed at his eyes. "Jesus. Is this for real?"

"I believe so. CERN’s tentative confirmation of the Higgs boson supports some of my underpinnings."

"Holy crap, this is...I can’t believe you showed me this. This is—you’re unifying at least five distinct problems—and what you’re saying about quantum gravity—there are people who would cut off a leg to to author a paper on one-tenth of the ideas you have here."

"But not you," Sheldon said.

"I wasn’t planning on stealing your work, no. When will you publish?"

"Soon. There are…" Penny glanced over at him; he was turned away from her, his hands clasped behind his back, the arches of his hairy wrists strangely delicate where they emerged from his sleeves. "It’s still unrefined," he finished. "Some of the math needs to be double-checked."

Outside the window, a second bird fluttered up to join the first, and Penny said, "Oh hey, that reminds me—so, Leonard, how’s Amy?"

"I think she’s into threesomes now, but I’m too afraid to ask," Leonard confessed.

"Oh for Eru’s sake," Sheldon snapped, and in a streak of bright colors and condescension stormed out of the room.

"Yeah?" Penny said. "Good for her."

Sheldon slammed back into the room, snatched his notebook from under Leonard’s elbow, and departed again, trailing a slightly more shameful cloud of frustration.

"So about this theory thing. Sheldon’s thing." Penny set down her coffee mug and rubbed her thumb over a streak down the side. "Are you sure about this? Because he’s been wrong before."

"You know, there’s a school of thought that says the value of a scientist isn’t in how correct their ideas are but in the number of ideas they produce, and by that measure Sheldon is _wildly_ successful."

"And?" Penny prompted.

"I’ve heard Stockholm is nice," Leonard said. "Not to change the subject, but have you thought at all about what I said to you before you guys moved out here?"

Penny spat her mouthful of coffee back into the cup. "I have to go," she said. "I—I think I left the stove on."

"Your stove is right here," Leonard pointed out.

"The stove in the bathroom!" Penny all but shouted, and then she bolted.

 

15.

So having Leonard around was good, it was great, but Penny started to get twitchy when she was cooped up and having not one but two indoor scientists around did not make the house feel larger. When Fatima called on Christmas Day to say she was headed down to New Mexico to visit family and knock around the Jemez Mountains and did Penny want to join her, Penny was packed and out the door before she had finished apologizing to Leonard for bailing.

"It’s fine, I’ll call a cab," he said, and Sheldon added, "Try not to break anything," which Penny almost managed—she took only a ten-foot tumble, which would've been nothing excruciating if she hadn’t cracked her nose pretty good upon landing. Fatima popped it back in place and gave Penny a couple of painkillers; Penny swallowed them dry.

"Hospital?" Fatima asked.

"Nope," said Penny.

 

16.

By the time she was home she had a matching set of black eyes. Sheldon emerged from his office long enough only to glare at her, as if she enjoyed being all bruised and achey.

Penny went to take a long nap and woke up, hours later, with the streetlight shining through her window and the thunder of fireworks rattling the house. She pulled on a robe, yawned wide enough to do a rattlesnake proud, and wandered downstairs to switch on the TV. In Time Square, a million people were screaming, smiling, hugging, cheering in the new year by the glow of civilization. So many people, Penny thought, and remembered New Mexico, where it seemed like everyone had their own acre of land, and maybe a little more for padding.

She’d just curled up on the couch and was thinking, maybe, about making herself some hot chocolate, when Sheldon came down the stairs, caught sight of her, and swerved towards the front door. He snatched up his old-geezer windbreaker and yanked it on, and Penny realized he was still dressed, that it was after midnight, and that he was leaving.

"Sheldon? Sheldon! Where are you—"

"Out," he said.

Penny shoved her feet into her dirtiest, warmest pair of boots and bolted after him. He was striding along so fast she was forced to break into a jog, and that made her trip twice on the hem of her robe before she gathered it up. It was freezing outside, too cold for a mere windbreaker, much less a mere bathrobe, and Sheldon was still hurtling north, straight for Long Island Sound.

"Sheldon, _stop!_ ," she screeched, but then her untied shoelaces tangled and she had to stop and do her boots up and then she pulled down her Hello Kitty shorts and hiked up her bathrobe and ran, dodging through backyards until grass turned to sand and she was there, at the ocean.

Sheldon was fifteen feet in front of her, standing with his arms crossed as he looked up at the sky. She took the last distance slow, even, shivering to a halt beside him and so startled she couldn’t even ask what the hell was going on.

The stars above were dimmed by the light pollution, but Penny had seen them up close now, and she knew how thickly they clustered, and how brilliantly they shone.

"You," Sheldon bit out, "are absurd. You are absurd, and irrational, and fragile, and you think that nothing can happen to you, you think that simply by _wanting_ something hard enough you can make it yours. You could die in—in so many ways—you could die from exhaustion, exposure, cerebral edema, you could be swept away in an avalanche, you could fall into a crevasse, you could lose all your fingers to frostbite—"

Penny thought about that while she looked at the sky. The stars were dim, unluminous motes this close to the city; but she had seen those stars at altitude, and desired to see them closer still.

"Are you trying to talk me out of it?" she said.

"Could I?" Sheldon looked at her sidelong. "No, I thought not."

In that moment, he could have. If he asked her to stay, if he forced her to admit that this whole stupid _deal_ had started as an escape even if it had become something else, if he told her that it was obvious she was set on this one suicidal task because she’d failed at so many others, Penny would have grown roots and lived right there on the beach for the rest of her days.

And then she looked down, and saw that she was wearing Sheldon’s Thursday bathrobe.

"Aw, shit," said Penny.

"Precisely my point," said Sheldon.

"What the hell are we supposed to do now?"

He shoved his hands into the pockets of his geezer jacket. He didn’t seem to mind that Penny was wearing his Thursday bathrobe. "When we left California, you agreed to owe me a favor."

"Ah, yep, I totally did, didn’t I," she said. She hoped she hadn’t torn anything; if there were rips or holes she’d have to take him to buy a whole new set of pajamas, because god forbid he wear his _Wednesday_ robe on a _Thursday_.

"I know what I want," Sheldon said.

Penny surrendered, figuring the robe was as good as hers now, and let the hem fall to the sand. Her legs felt a little warmer, at least.

"All right," she said. "All right, Sheldon, hit me."

"I want you to come back alive."

"Oh, this is not even FAIR—no, sweetie, I’m not talking to you, it’s just—aaargh!" She sat down hard, and now her butt was cold and she had sand everywhere.

"Well, this is a funny time to throw a tantrum," Sheldon said. "You can’t renege on your favor. I have it in writing."

"I’m not trying to rened—reni—you know what, fine, if that’s what you really want I guess I'll do my best to live."

"We should shake on it," Sheldon said, and now he peered down at her, satisfaction edging out confusion on his face.

"Only if we spit on our palms first," Penny said, half-joking.

She was startled when Sheldon said, "Very well, just this once," and spat. She copied him with the distant thought that it really was kind of a disgusting tradition, but when she offered him her hand and he took it, she could no longer think of anything at all.


End file.
